Photo: Greengage co-founders Lindsey Goodchild and Dessy Daskalov at a JOLT demo day

Greengage Mobile is a Toronto-based startup that’s fast becoming the go-to for companies, not-for-profits, and governments looking to engage their employees and citizens in healthy living, green, and community initiatives on a large scale. They are also one of TWG’s first startup investments, and this week they announced that they raised $1 Million in their recent funding round.

Over the past year Greengage has rolled out their platform to a range of organizations across finance, accounting, manufacturing and higher education. Their latest round of funding, from the Investment Accelerator Fund, The RBC Generator Fund and Waterloo’s Golden Triangle AngelNet, will be used to meet growing customer demand and develop new features on its mobile app and web-based management platform.

As one of Greengage’s earliest investors it’s been incredibly exciting to watch their journey. Their boundless energy and enthusiasm has been a constant, and as their company has grown, so has their business acumen, knowledge and confidence in their product. At TWG, we evaluate each of our startup investment candidates against three primary criteria: Domain expertise, leadership team and market opportunity. Against each of these three, Greengage continue to impress us every day.

We’re excited to see what happens next… and starting today we’ll get to follow along even more closely than before. We’re happy to announce that the Greengage team have moved from their East-end home into our office incubator at 425 Adelaide Street West, working alongside our team and our friends from ShopLocket, Timeraiser, Grantbook, Scalability and Appstruments.

I first met Greengage when Lindsey Goodchild, Greengage’s CEO, was working with Ryan Poissant, one of MaRS’ advisors, who introduced us to one another. She needed help with design, product development and with technical production – all things The Working Group is well positioned to provide. I could see the potential of her business, and agreed to invest in Greengage by resourcing their tech implementation (Android, Blackberry and back-end support).

One of the developers assigned to work on the Greengage project was Dessy Daskalov. Dessy has been working with us for a while and was looking for an opportunity to spread her wings and try building a company of her own. Assigned to the Greengage project, her and Lindsey hit it off immediately, sharing a background in sustainability and a drive to build something that made the world a better place. A few beers down the road, and with our blessing, Dessy agreed to become Lindsey’s co-founder and transitioned into Greengage’s kick-ass CTO. Dessy remains a familiar face around the TWG office and is the moderator of #nerdlearn, our dev-focussed beer ‘n’ pizza panel night.

Dessy moderating a panel on Hardware Hacking for Software Developers at #nerdlearn

I asked Lindsey to share some thoughts on what it’s like to partner with The Working Group as an early-stage startup:

“The Working Group is a little bit like a start up themselves. They definitely have that entrepreneurial spirit about them, which means they truly understand how to partner with growing companies in a way that is genuinely helpful.

They have a very open culture, which means we’ve always felt comfortable coming to them with our questions and talking through various technical and business angles to the business. We, at Greengage, have certainly benefitted from TWG’s software expertise and support, and we’re excited to be moving into their space next week to mark the next chapter of our relationship”

Thanks Lindsey, Dessy, and congratulations to the whole Greengage team on your excellent news. We can’t wait until you move in!

TWG Helps Startups

We’ve often seen that startups can have great ability in one or more areas of their business, but gaps in others – be it design, product management, implementation, or customer acquisition. With 12 years experience under our belts at TWG, we’re well positioned to fill those gaps and ensure the greatest chance of success. Every startup is different, and so no cookie cutter solutions are offered. Some teams work in-house at TWG, some are remote, but we’re happy to explore a range of help and advisement for successful startup candidates.

If you’re a startup and you’d like to find out how TWG could help your organization, please get in touch via email at invest@twg.ca. We’ll have a coffee and chat!